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Barton: Chisolm's YouTube purge

Chatham County District Attorney Larry Chisolm, a Democrat, took another one on the chin Tuesday.

This time, it came from three Democrats and former prosecutors, who publicly announced they are supporting Republican candidate Meg Heap in the Nov. 6 race here for D.A.

That’s not politics as usual in this town. Democrats typically don’t endorse Republicans, or vice versa. That’s like Gladys Knight coming out against the Pips.

But for Chisolm, it was another day at the office. His administration is like a reverse Top 40 show on radio. The hits just keep on coming — in his direction.

The first-term district attorney has been battered by discrimination complaints by former staffers, including one ex-employee who will be $270,000 richer. The exodus of veteran prosecutors in this crime-fighting arm of local government has extracted a big price. Witness Chisolm’s recent appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, a last-ditch effort to salvage his botched attempt to bring the accused killer of 12-year-old Ashleigh Moore to justice.

But as badly as things have been going for Chisolm lately, it could have been worse.

How much worse? Think a major case of foot-in-mouth disease.

Sometime after Sept. 24, someone posted a video on YouTube of Chisolm giving a speech to his supporters at the opening of his campaign headquarters on DeRenne Avenue that day.

Someone sent me the link — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdwyWJGjBIE — but don’t bother using it. It’s useless. The user had the video removed.

And no wonder. It makes blood temperatures rise.

But I saw it before it was removed. So did three other people I know. All had the same reaction: Did an elected official in Chatham County really say that?

The video of Chisolm’s speech is about five minutes long. The first four minutes are pretty mundane. Then he seemed to channel former Savannah Mayor Otis Johnson in playing racial politics and citing Providence as having a hand in the race for D.A.

Maybe Chisolm does have a special hot line to the Man Upstairs. If so, he should ask for a divine infusion of $270,000 to pay what a federal jury here decided that he owed.

But the racial rhetoric was uncalled for. This election is about performance. Period.

“I don’t know about ‘our time,’” said a white attorney who saw the video and is a card-carrying Democrat. “I’m just waiting for it to be the time of that little black girl whose accused murder walked free because this district attorney missed the deadline for prosecuting him.”

At the time I watched the video, only a few dozen viewers had seen it, according to the YouTube counter. I have no idea when the user removed it.

My guess is that not that many people saw it, which is good for Chisolm. And since YouTube doesn’t archive such things, there’s no way to retrieve it once it’s purged. That’s good for Chisolm, too.

But there’s no way he can squelch three Democrats and former prosecutors who came out Tuesday for his GOP foe. They include Donnie Dixon, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia; Ken Hodges, the former district attorney in Albany; and Spencer Lawton Jr., former Chatham County district attorney for 28 years and the man who once gave Chisolm a job.

It’s tempting to encourage Chisolm’s campaign to re-post the Sept. 24 video. Then viewers could judge it for themselves.

But that’s going to happen the same day that the state Supreme Court agrees with Chisolm, that Superior Court Judge Penny Haas Freesemann erred back in May when she found that four years and five months was too long to delay the prosecution of a 12-year-old girl’s accused killer.